


lee chaerin, in the last judgment

by babelincoln



Category: 2NE1
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brief non-descript mention of suicide, Constant Mentions of Death, F/F, Obsession, One-Sided Attraction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 12:37:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20436155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babelincoln/pseuds/babelincoln
Summary: minji wants to swear to never draw a single portrait again, but she’s morbidly fascinated by her newfound powers. so she flicks the tv on and picks the first person she sees. a pretty popstar with candy coloured hair. lee chaerin. minji had never particularly liked lee chaerin’s music. coldly, minji thinks that perhaps she wouldn’t care if she disappeared from the world.so she paints her, beautiful and swathed in pink, ceiling to floor. it takes her a week. she waits another for news. and then another. and then another. she draws her again and again, covering all four walls in the same smiling face, keeping up with her hundreds of hair colours; like a sistine chapel of malintent.chaerin doesn’t die.





	lee chaerin, in the last judgment

minji had taken to etching on her walls whenever they felt like they were moving too far apart. it was something she could remember facing reprimand for- a younger, chubbier her with bubbly tears and pouted lips and her mother’s scolding tone and hot pink highlighters snatched from her grasp. it’s just one thing she can do now, even if nineteen was far too old to be doodling on walls. there’s nobody to tell her no anymore. so she’d sit in their bedroom, where the housekeeping daren’t enter, nor the maternal grandmother who had been sent to continue her upbringing. day after day. and each day, it’d mean less. the walls, white and pristine and stripped, somehow, of their decor, would get too big and too white and too empty. and so she’d fill them with her drawings. pink highlighter and some other colours too; little pictures of woodland elves and bad witches, charitable princes, knights in armour rescuing princesses from their towers. impersonal and silly and easy to part with. and at the end of every month, she’d take a paint roller and erase them all. back to white. she thinks she tells herself that one month, she’ll feel okay and she’ll stop forever. close her parent’s bedroom door and never open it again, stop pursuing the childish hope that if she continues to misbehave, her mother and father will somehow come back and sooth her with the discomforting comfort of retribution. 

she’d always had an artistic streak, and minji soon grew bored of fiction and fantasy. eventually, she began to draw portraits — people who had influenced her in small ways, a girl who smiled at her in the street. a sales assistant who’d given her a knowing glance when her grandmother dragged her around a store looking at dresses neither of them would ever wear. a street dancer with a shock of short platinum hair and jeans that looked four sizes too big. she didn’t know them, really. nor did they know each other. minji was pleased to be the fleeting chain connecting their lives together by second long encounters. and then she sees the first girl’s picture on the internet, heading an article detailing how she’d been mowed down by a drunk driver in her sleepy suburban neighbourhood. the sales assistant is slaughtered by a jealous ex lover. the street dancer steps in front of a train. 

minji becomes both the link connecting their lives and the link connecting their deaths. she returns to her fantasy world. somehow, she convinces herself her art had been prophetic.

minji wants to swear to never draw a single portrait again, but she’s morbidly fascinated by her newfound powers. if it had been a coincidence four times over, she wants to know. she needs confirmation. so she flicks the tv on and picks the first person she sees. a pretty popstar with candy coloured hair. lee chaerin. minji had never particularly liked lee chaerin’s music, generic girl pop with no substance, manufactured by teams of twenty and seemingly run past several focus groups to ensure it was absolutely radio-friendly, as nothing came before that. coldly, minji thinks that perhaps she wouldn’t care if lee chaerin disappeared from the world. 

so she paints her, beautiful and swathed in pink, ceiling to floor. it takes her a week. she waits another for news. and then another. and then another. she draws her again and again, covering all four walls in the same smiling face, keeping up with her hundreds of hair colours; like a sistine chapel of malintent.

chaerin doesn’t die. 

minji becomes fascinated. if she’d needed anything to take her mind away from her parents, she hadn’t thought it would be chaerin, but that’s who it would become. minji watches every interview, absorbs every mannerism. the confidence with which she carries herself, unafraid to look imperfect, the fire in her eyes when she performs. minji stares at the pictures on her walls and compares them to photographs of chaerin in magazines, studies the almond of her eyes, her plump lips and subtle little curve of her cupid’s bow. minji falls in over her head, and suddenly the paranoia sets in, because her parent’s bedroom is wallpapered with chaerin’s death warrants, signed by minji in arcane cursive, wishing an end to yet another starlet. she spends almost forty eight hours painting and repainting the walls, whiting out her artworks, trying to undo the curse she fears she’d placed on a woman who was so beautiful, so innocent. lee chaerin’s only crimes were vapid pop songs- and even those were beginning to worm their way into minji’s heart by now.

minji’s grandmother had never entered the bedroom, letting it be minji’s space, although she must smell the fumes of the paint. she must, however, hear chaerin’s music playing day in and day out, or see the amount of magazines laying around with the singer’s face plastered upon their glossy front covers, because when minji’s birthday approaches- the first one without her parents- she’s given two tickets to go and see chaerin in concert. she doesn’t have any contact with her friends. she had dropped out of university a week after her parents’ accident, and had only left the house in company of her grandmother ever since. her grandmother tells her not to worry, that she’ll go with her. she’d bought seats in the stands for a reason. 

she doesn’t touch the walls for months, and chaerin’s tour goes without a hitch so far. no accidents, no reports of van troubles, not so much as a bad review. minji reads in the newspaper that a famous actress has gotten in a serious car crash, left unresponsive and braindead, a living organism but no longer a person with life. it’s a long interview with her parents, who explain why they cannot bring themselves to pull the plug despite knowing that their daughter is no longer truly occupying her body. minji thinks that if her powers are real, then this could be argued to be a good use. she draws a little picture of the actress in ballpoint pen, in a corner of her parent’s bedroom, barely big enough for details. three days later, the actress dies in her sleep. minji types lee chaerin into google and refreshes the news tab until the sun rises on the next day. 

chaerin goes nowhere but venue to venue, until eventually she’s in minji’s city. minji watches her from the stands, far away but in physical form, and she feels as if she’s staring at an angel, lit up by spotlights and singing and dancing and living. lee chaerin is alive by all counts, live in three dimensions, and minji has not cursed her. she stares until she’s crying, singing at the top of her lungs, songs she hates with all her heart but god if she isn’t happy to see the most beautiful woman to exist hasn’t ceased to continue doing such. her grandmother smiles with tears of her own, minji is happy to allow her to think she is just excited to see her alleged idol perform. 

online legend had had it that chaerin would often stop outside the venue after each show to interact with her fans, and minji leaves her grandmother outside the front doors to race to the back of the building, pushing through what seems like a horde of aggressive teenagers, elbowing boys and girls in the ribs and fighting dirty to make her way to the front of the crowd, where lee chaerin stands. she meets her eyes and smiles, mouthing a Hey, and minji, unfiltered and overwhelmed and realising the impossibility of camera catching true beauty, that even melted foundation clinging to skin filmed in sweat and hair quickly thrown up to keep out of way couldn’t stop lee chaerin from being otherworldly. minji knows all the things she should say, to this stranger, but she says the one thing she shouldn’t. she blurts out, loud and panicked, “why aren’t you dead yet?”

the question seems to take chaerin off guard, and minji thinks, from the look on her face, that she finds it hurtful, and that makes her realise what she’d said and how it sounds. chaerin stands, staring at her in uncomfortable silence, before laughing, hot pink lips splitting into an unsure smirk. “babe.” she says, eyeing minji carefully. “i can’t die yet. i don’t have enough songs for a decent compilation album.” 

minji goes home and sits on her parent’s bed. she stares at the white walls and thinks, sadly, that chaerin’s attempt at humour rung more like a morbid prophecy than anything she had ever drawn.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> something really short. I guess I’m back on my angst bullshit after a brief holiday to smut town djdhdjj i hope people enjoy, I left a lot of things mind of vague as I went into writing this knowing that I wanted it not to stray too far from the 1k mark. I wanted the narration to take an emptier, fact of the matter tone than I usually have but I worry that I just wrote Minzy’s voice to be boring and dull. I wanted to reflect the fact that Minzy isn’t processing emotions or understanding why she’s feeling the way she does. Anyway! Okay so much you can capture in 1k words so I won’t ramble on too much in the notes and let you guys understand the story the way you want to!


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